


a vermilion bird

by taizi



Category: Natsume Yuujinchou | Natsume's Book of Friends
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 12:30:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10490931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taizi/pseuds/taizi
Summary: They represent all the virtues, Kaname thinks he remembers reading. Justice and kindness, loyalty and honesty. They won’t stand to be around a person found wanting. They won’t come to impure or unhappy places.





	

****Kaname wakes up to a tapping on his bedroom window. When he lifts his head, groggily, and squints through the dark, it’s to find Natsume’s face peering at him from the other side of the glass. For a moment or two, Kaname is suspended uncomprehendingly in something of a liminal space – and then, a heartbeat later, he makes sense of what he’s seeing and shoots upright, scrambling across the room.

“What are you doing here?” Kaname asks, once he’s slid the window open and warm summer night air has had a chance to stretch its languid fingers inside. He’s rubbing sleep from his eyes, more awake with every second, and the massive creature Natsume is riding on becomes less and less defined as he does. Still, Kaname says, “Hello, Ponta.”

Before the yokai can get a word in edgewise, Natsume says, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

His tawny hair is tousled, and his face is chapped pink from flying too fast against the wind, and his clothes are more ruffled than Kaname’s pajamas probably are – but his eyes are impossibly bright in the moonlight, and the curve of his smile is wide and infectious, and when he puts out his hand, Kaname takes it.

(When he puts out his hand, there’s nothing else in the world Kaname can think of to do but take it.)

“Just let me get my shoes,” he says.

* * *

A flight up the mountain later, Kaname is running through the forest in the dark half of the morning. Ponta is a solid weight on his shoulder, and Natsume’s pace is tireless.

“Her name is Suzaku,” Natsume tells him breathlessly. “We met her three days ago. Sensei and I accidentally stumbled across her while she was hiding.”

“Her kind conceal themselves during troubled times,” Ponta interjects, sly in a way that doesn’t usually bode well. Out of his periphery, Kaname manages to catch the sharp look Natsume gives the fat calico. “She had sensed a coming disaster, and refused to be budged until Natsume agreed to help.”

“ _Sensei –_ “

“A disaster?” Kaname parrots back in disbelief. “What kind of disaster?” And what business did a high-schooler have stopping it?

“There was – um – it’s a long story,” his friend says lamely, which really only means ‘I did something reckless and it won’t make you happy to hear about it.’ “Ah, anyway – Suzaku is ready to leave now, but I convinced her to stay long enough for you to see her.”

Kaname swallows back a few biting words, and focuses for a moment on dodging a handful of thick tree roots that jut through the ground ahead. Natsume has gotten so good about _telling him_ when these things happen that, subsequently, Kaname has gotten worse about letting it slide the few times he won’t.

A happy equilibrium, Kaname thinks, with a wry sense of humor he has to work to make real. Whatever happened, he can afford to let it go. Natsume is still flesh and bone beside him, and his back was warm against Kaname’s chest while they flew, and that uncertain sidelong glance of pretty amber eyes is as disarming as it ever was.

So he says, “Tell me about her.”

Natsume's smile comes back with all the brilliance of a small star, nearly outshining the moon.

* * *

They’re surrounded on all sides by the flickering presence of ayakashi – a multitude of eager and awed auras that feel a little bit like a crowd of excited children, straining keenly for a peek and knowing better than to press closer.

Kaname doesn’t blame them. 

He’s read about Suzaku’s kind before. 

They’re the symbol of the Imperial household, and they were said to appear at the beginning of a new era. According to myth, seeing one was a sign of good fortune, and they used to be used to decorate the houses of upstanding people.  

But for all that Kaname knows a very little bit, he might as well know nothing, because there isn’t a text on Earth that could do Suzaku justice.

She stands as tall as Kaname’s waist, with a serpent-like neck and a crest of feathers on her head that resembles a diadem. Her plumage is a rich red wine color in the shadow of the trees and the heavy overhang of nighttime, and her long tail has a fork at the end like a fish.

She has a voice that Kaname can’t hear, and eyes like a bright summer sky.

“In the daylight, she _shines,_ ” Natsume tells him, and Kaname can only imagine. 

Hō-ō, as he learns that night, are beautiful. 

“She’s a brat yet by yokai standards, probably only a century old at most,” Ponta points out, but even he doesn’t sound as self-satisfied as he usually does. There’s something reverent, almost fond, in the way he adds, “Hō-ō seldom talk to mortals, so human speech is something they pick up slowly.” 

“She’s doing a good job,” Natsume protests, kneeling hardly an arms length away from her red talons and curved beak. She warbles at him, and cranes her neck to put them eye-to-eye. Grinning, Natsume adds, “She’s learned a lot in just the past few days. And she’s picked up a few words from sensei that I _know_ her sisters won’t like.”

The phoenix supposedly represents all the virtues, Kaname thinks he remembers reading. Justice and kindness, loyalty and honesty. They won’t stand to be around a person found wanting. They won’t come to impure or unhappy places.

Kaname wonders what the Fujiwaras would say if he could tell them that a phoenix came to their house. It stayed in their foster son’s bedroom, and watched over him through the night while he slept. 

“She has to leave soon, Tanuma,” Natsume says, beckoning him closer. “Come say goodbye.”

It’s two o’clock in the morning, or something close to it, and a school night. Kaname is wearing track pants and a T-shirt, kneeling in thick forest litter halfway up the mountainside, barely a foot away from a legendary  _phoenix_ in the flesh. 

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see something otherwordly. Natsume gave him that. 

And so it’s ridiculous, he knows it is, that he spends most of this limited time in Suzaku’s presence looking at Natsume instead. 

* * *

They’re in less of a hurry on the way back, and with Suzaku gone Natsume’s energy begins to flag. His hands are woven into sensei’s thick fur, shoulders canted just a little into a tired slump now that he’s given up whatever mantle that fire-bird had given him.

Kaname wants to ask what the last three days were like. He wants to know what the Hō-ō needed from Natsume, wants to know if this constant worry that lives in the back of his mind is justified in rearing its head this time.

He can’t find the words. 

They’re halfway home when Natsume says softly, “I’m glad I got to show you. Thank you for coming with me.”

And there’s little else Kaname can do but lean forward. He lets go of Ponta with one hand and curls fingers into the back of Natsume’s sweatshirt and holds on. Natsume is quiet, and doesn’t say anything when Kaname’s forehead comes to rest against his shoulder. 

But he doesn’t pull away, either. And when they land in Kaname’s yard, to one side of the pond Kaname can’t see, Natsume slips slender fingers through Kaname’s and pulls him up short before he can so much as think of stepping away or saying goodnight. 

This close, the yokai fish are quicksilver reflections in his eyes. 

“You’re gonna be exhausted during class,” he says sheepishly. “I’m sorry for dragging you out of bed.”

“Don’t be,” Kaname is quick to tell him. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.” 

(He can say it so easily because he knows it for the irrefutable truth. Given the choice between five minutes with Natsume and the whole world for the rest of his life, Kaname isn’t at all uncertain about which of the two he would take.)

Natsume’s expression is affectionate and inviting, his hand in Kaname’s squeezing tight – and he’s brave in ways Kaname can’t begin to imagine, but in this, at least, Kaname has more courage. He leans in, and down, and kisses him. 

And it’s far more breathtaking than a thousand fiery phoenixes, far more remarkable than a thousand invisible fishponds, that Natsume leans up on the toes of his sneakers to kiss him back. 


End file.
